


Apeirophobia

by Silex



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Dark, Gen, Horror, POV Nonhuman, Trick or Treat: Trick, Villains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-12-28 01:07:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21128261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: Apeirophobia: The fear of infinity.Visser Three has spent a great deal of time pondering the universe he exists in, probably more than he should. Of course it's a luxury he can afford due to his rank and unique position as the only Andalite controller. He's seen much, experienced much and inhabited enough different beings to have a great deal to think about. Some of the conclusions he's reached though...





	Apeirophobia

Esplin 9466 slid free of Alloran-Semitur-Corrass into the warm welcome of the Kandrona ray saturated pool.

Away from the Andalite’s dull and resentful thoughts he had only his own.

He despised it, being alone.

That was why he had his own private pool, not fear of assassination, though that was certainly there. He knew full well that there were those of his own kind who resented him or thought that they could do better and had nothing to lose by destroying him when he was at his most vulnerable.

But those concerns were minor compared to the disgust he felt.

He was a proud Yeerk, wanting to do what was best for himself and his people. He was a destined ruler and his people destined conquerors. It was what they had evolved to be and it made his revulsion all the stronger.

Being alone, in his own body was a comfort. Instinctively he knew that this was where he was meant to be, floating in the liquid he felt free and at peace.

It was vile.

He knew what he looked like, the same as any other Yeerk. Clonal reproduction was not uncommon. After all it was in his very name, the doubled digit a constant reminder that he was not unique genetically.

It was experience that made him different from his twin brother, a borrowed phrase nowhere near intimate enough to describe what Esplin 9466 Lesser was. Scent and touch and the distinct reaction of chemicals and pheromones would let him tell his fellows from each other if he were to mingle with them outside of his host, but why would he?

Why would he seek contact with his own kind when he could barely stand his own self?

That enough of his fellows could tolerate each other that the species could survive amazed him. Perhaps it was loyalty to the Yeerk Empire, or perhaps it was self-loathing in its truest form, reproduction as a most noble suicide.

It may have been simple genetic drive overwhelming all else.

Or there may have been something even more foul to it.

Chemosynthetic, closer to plants than animals, relying on the radiation of a fake sun to fuel survival, sentience without a body, sapience without release.

How had such a thing been cursed with reason? Blighted with philosophers to ponder their miserable station and dream of exultation? Symbiosis with the Gedd had always been a fact of life, two fractional species miserably wed into a farrago that never should have been.

There was no explanation for either of them.

Except there was and it was repulsive, a slow dawning realization that came with the expansion of the Empire.

That a species so blessed and foolish as the Andalites had needed to show them stung, but it was only by contrast that disparity could be revealed.

If the Andalites had never come, never saw fit to reach out to a wretched half-species, the Yeerk Empire never would have been. His people would have forever lived in their pools, thinking, breeding and dying under the light of a generous and uncaring sun.

That he was born in the sterile confines of a spaceship under a false sun was something he was thankful for.

To see his own home would have been mortifying.

Because he would have searched for some sign of what he had come to suspect by agonizing inches.

The contrast of the Yeerks and the Gedd to everything in existence was the first hint. Neither of them could have survived on their own, accumulation of dead end and useless traits that survived against all reason. The first Yeerk never should have existed to by chance enter the first Gedd, and the Gedd should have been long extinct by the time such a Yeerk could have existed.

Yet that never happened. Useless traits met and made a slightly more functional whole.

Then there were the Taxxons. He had never needed to use one as a host, but they were kin to his kind, equally vile. They had intelligence and fears and hunger. Creatures that existed to eat had no use for thoughts and yet they did. Taxxons knew fear and hope. Sapience had come into being where it was useless.

The Hork-Bajir were another beautiful example. Pointless instincts and a drive against curiosity. Their intelligence could be likened to a well programed machine and even more fascinating, there would be occasions when one as intelligent as any Yeerk would crop up. A whole species that somehow had genetic limitations on intellect despite a perfectly, beautifully specialized and functional body.

More horrifying was that intelligence was not inherited, that it hadn’t been bred for.

Why weren’t the Hork-Bajir ruled by an intellectual elite by the time the Yeerk Empire had come for them?

It made no sense.

There was part of an answer to that in the race that the Hork-Bajir shared their world with, the useless Arn. Impossible to use as hosts not by accident, but by design. Deliberately they had made it so that they would die the instant a Yeerk touched their brain. Much of their science and technology had been lost with the enslavement of their race, but the Arn had boasted about having engineered themselves to be unfit hosts and hints of that remained.

If they had done that to themselves then it was possible that they had done something similar with the Hork-Bajir, but even that was a horrifying thought.

A whole engineered race.

Esplin 9466 hated to think such a thing, but more and more it was something he was forced to consider.

Especially after the discovery of humans. A perfect species, the ultimate generalists, there for the taking. Or they should have been, but that was a separate source of ire. The Andalite guerillas that constantly thwarted him were mercifully unrelated for he wasn’t so disillusioned to believe that every obstacle in his path, every stone under hoof was deliberately placed.

The humans held the answer, the inarticulate legends of the Taxxons put into comprehensible words.

They believed things, impossible things. Humans believed that they had been created for a reason.

Not all of them, but enough of them that it wasn’t some fluke. The uniformity of the belief was shocking. It was a wonderful thing, making them easy to take as hosts. Find the right in, the right person to make a controller and they would line up to receive Yeerks.

It should have made them easy to conquer, but countless little problems arose, that some desired a slow, careful siege rather than a simple and swift war of conquest.

He had his thoughts on the matter, thoughts he had articulated countless times for what good it had done.

He played his game by the rules of others because to do otherwise would be to lose his standing.

To have rank and Alloran-Semitur-Corrass stripped from him.

He would be executed, or worse.

They might force him to live out his life without a host. In such an instance he could understand the allure of the noble suicide of reproduction when one’s own form left any other death beyond reach.

Hork-Bajir and Andalites would slit their own throats, humans were endlessly creative in their seeking death, able to choose to stop eating or drinking and waste away.

A Yeerk existed whether or not it willed otherwise, all biological processes beyond its control.

There was no reasoning for such a creature and yet they existed.

They reasoned.

He didn’t know how widespread his theory was, for he would never share it, to do so would be madness, for the theory itself was madness.

Or perhaps it was the only sanity in all of the universe.

Perhaps others thought it and were similarly silent.

He would never know.

He never cared to know.

The thought terrified and repulsed him as much as the helplessness of his own body outside of Alloran-Semitur-Corrass.

There was an order to things, a hierarchy that showed up again and again. Just as the Yeerks had leaders so did other species, it seemed to be a requisite for sapience.

Amid sapience in all its varying forms there was a hierarchy as well, degrees to which beings were aware. Things like Gedd and Taxxons were at the lowest, barely there, yet not animals.

There were beings like Yeerks, the hated Andalites, they seemed to be at the top of the hierarchy.

But what if it was exactly what it was, mere seeming.

Humans breed animals for their amusement. Andalites had their morphing technology, a subset of their remarkable understanding of genetics and genetic engineering.

What if there were beings above them? As far removed from Yeerks and Yeerks were from Gedd?

Farther even.

The universe was vast and who knew what lay beyond what was known.

Humans could barely imagine faster than light travel yet it was a simple enough trick.

In the same way Andalites could barely imagine time travel, the manipulation of the very rules by which all existence was ordered.

What if there were those who had done more than imagine it?

That and a rudimentary understanding of genetics would mean that the humans were right.

Or, if that was too much, sufficient sadism and basic genetics was enough.

A universe seeded with failed experiments or cruel diversions for beings that has cares and concerns as far beyond Esplin 9466’s understanding as his own would be for the nameless Gedd that had been his first host.

Humans were fools to believe in a benevolent universe.

It took a parasite to see that if such beings existed that they cared for nothing other than themselves and their own amusement.

There was no reason for him to think that there was any reason for it to be real.

There was no reason for a chemosynthetic slug to think.

And yet…

**Author's Note:**

> I got to thinking about this setting and realized that it makes for really good horror. Also, I meant to gift this to you, but for some reason AO3 ate the tag.


End file.
